As post offices in the Puget Sound area, including Seattle, are suffering from staff shortages, in some areas, residents are not receiving valuable mail such as social security checks or drug prescriptions on time, even though couriers work overtime until midnight, the Seattle Times reported in an in-depth article. did.
Jan Staley, the shop owner of Bacion Island, runs the store with mailboxes for 150 residents, but on a fictional day, the deliveryman doesn’t come, so she drives to the post office herself, picks up the mail, sorts it, and puts it in the mailbox. “The store has become a post office,” he said.
Virgilio Gause (30) of the Wallingford Post Office, who has been delivering for 6 years, said that recently, there are many apartments and backyards in the North Seattle neighborhood, so if you go around 895 streets, you will walk more than 7 miles (16,000 steps) over 8 hours. Having worked 55 to 72 hours a week for the past several years, he said that he only slept all day on off-duty days.
Kevin Gottlieb, chairman of the postal union (79 branches) in Seattle, including Mill Creek and Avon, said that the number of postal workers in the branch, which was 1,764 in early 2021, decreased by 200 to 1,547 at the end of last year. He said that many baby boomer generation delivery workers had retired, and many employees had left the post office due to the corona pandemic.
Gottlieb explained that some carriers go to work at 6:00 a.m. and deliver until midnight. They often get into car accidents, get bitten by dogs, or are mistaken for thieves by landlords.
He said that the starting wage for delivery workers is between 19 and 23 dollars per hour, and if they work more than 8 hours a day, they get overtime, but post offices with a lot of labor shortages break their labor contracts and make them work 12 hours a day (60 hours a week), and even managers make deliveries. He revealed, “I’ve never seen such a predicament while working at the post office for 35 years.”
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said it spent more than $80 million in overtime pay for its employees in 2021, and less than half of that $40 million in 2015.
The shortage of couriers is a nationwide phenomenon, especially after the 2020 appointment of Lewis DeJoy, a Republican mega-donor during the Trump administration, to post office director. Furthermore, union officials explained that it is very difficult to find candidates for postal delivery in Seattle, which is considered one of the most expensive cities nationwide.